William Fense Weaver (24 July 1923 – 12 November 2013) was an English language translator of modern Italian literature.

Weaver was best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, but translated many other Italian authors over the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years. In addition to prose, he translated Italian poetry and opera libretti, and worked as a critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

Biography

William Weaver was born in Virginia in 1923, and attended boarding school starting at age 12. Educated at Princeton University, he graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude in 1946, followed by postgraduate study at the University of Rome in 1949. Weaver was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War II for the American Field Service, and lived primarily in Italy after the end of the war. Through his friendships with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and others, Weaver met many of Italy's leading authors and intellectuals in Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he paid tribute to them in his anthology Open City (1999).

Later in his life, Weaver was a professor of literature at Bard College in New York, and a Bard Center Fellow. He received honorary degrees from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and Trinity College in Connecticut. According to translator Geoffrey Brock, Weaver was too ill to translate Umberto Eco's novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana 2004).

Weaver died in Rhinebeck, New York.

  • 1969, for Calvino's Cosmicomics
  • PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
  • 1984, for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
  • 1990, for Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
  • 1991 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation
  • The John Florio Prize for Italian Translations from The Society of Authors
  • 1969, for Pier Pasolini's A Violent Life
  • 1971, for Giorgio Bassani's The Heron
  • 1971, for Italo Calvino's Time and the Hunter
  • 1992, for Rosetta Loy's The Dust Roads of Monferrato
  • The Lewis Galantiere Prize from the American Translators Association
  • Member, The American Academy of Arts and Letters

Quotes

  • "Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics." — On the fact that Calvino's English translations have never been best-sellers, but have instead steady, consistent sales year after year. [http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calweaver.html]
  • "Translating Calvino is an aural exercise as well as a verbal one. It is not a process of turning this Italian noun into that English one, but rather of pursuing a cadence, a rhythm—sometimes regular, sometimes wilfully jagged—and trying to catch it, while, like a Wagner villain, it may squirm and change shape in your hands." [http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calweaver.html]
  • "Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, 'buon giorno' for instance. How to translate that? We don't say 'good day,' except in Australia. It has to be translated 'good morning' or 'good evening' or 'good afternoon' or 'hello.' You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it's taking place, because in some places they start saying 'buona sera' ('good evening') at 1:00 P.M. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it's evening for them. So someone could say 'buona sera,' but you can't translate it as 'good evening' because the scene is taking place at 3:00 P.M. You need to know the language but, even more, the life of the country." — From the Paris Review interview, 2002.

Notes

Sources

  • Robin Healey's monumental Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation: An Annotated Bibliography () was extremely helpful in the preparation of the bibliography portion of this entry.
  • Porto Ludovica from The Modern Word, supplied additional details on Eco translations.
  • William Weaver on Italo Calvino
  • The Path to the Nest of Translation by Giulia Guarnieri
  • William Weaver, Influential Translator of Modern Italian literature, Dies at 90 By BRUCE WEBER Published: November 16, 2013